Nonexistence of locally but not globally supersymmetric orbifolds

Abstract

Motivated by the smallness of the cosmological constant we investigate whether it is possible to have vanishing one-loop heterotic string partition functions for six-dimensional non-supersymmetric toroidal orbifolds. A straightforward way to realize this presents itself, when each orbifold sector separately preserves some Killing spinors, but none of them survives in all sectors combined. By applying some representation theory to the abstract finite point groups underlying toroidal orbifolds it turns out, that this is never possible. This leads to a nonexistence proof of locally but not globally supersymmetric orbifolds.